The Razer Phone is skipping Android Oreo 8.0, going straight to 8.1

The Razer Phone was launched in November of last year and came with Android 7.1.1 Nougat on board, which made sense as Android 8.0 Oreo was very new at the time. Now, Razer has confirmed its plans for updating its flagship phone with the latest flavor of Google's mobile OS.

In fact the phone is skipping the 8.0 release and jumping straight to 8.1, Razer has confirmed on Twitter. Razer Phone owners should find the update rolling out to their phones at some point in the middle of April, if everything goes to plan.

Razer has also made a developer preview of the software available for download here, should you want to manually flash the Oreo 8.1 update to your handset and help Razer squash some bugs along the way. Unless you're particularly keen to enjoy the goodness of Oreo, you're probably better off waiting a few weeks.

What's on the way?

With Google's apps updated separately from Android itself, there isn't a huge list of new features you can make use of in Oreo, but better notification management (including snoozing for alerts) and support for picture-in-picture modes are included.

As we said in our review, the Razer Phone has a lot going for it, particularly if you're using your mobile for gaming or for watching movies. It was a bold move for the gaming brand to launch a smartphone of its own, but it's managed to pull something out of the hat to compete with the big boys.

And what of the Razer Phone 2? The rumors are that Razer is indeed planning a follow-up to its 2017 launch, with a processor upgrade perhaps the biggest bump in terms of specs (the well-equipped Razer Phone 1 already has a huge 8GB of RAM).